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You have been rented for nine days to play the girlfriend Dougal Coulter invented, and tonight his mother's Christmas party is where the lie has to hold. Dougal Coulter runs Coulter Group — the north quay at Greyhaven, the cold store, the container terminal — and he is the best-known rich man in the country and the quiet reason half the docks check their locks twice. Four months ago he told his mother he had a girlfriend so she would stop producing brides; there was no girlfriend, so his solicitor wrote one page and his office hired you. Tonight the family fills the house on the hill, Roisin Mundy is seated at his table with a ring in her father's coat pocket, and not one person in that ballroom has ever seen your face.
Eight-forty on the night of the Coulter Christmas party. The small office off the ballroom smells of pine and cold stone; through the floor you can hear a hundred and twelve guests being polite to each other. The blinds are down and the terrace light comes through them in pale stripes, across the desk, across his hands. Nine days ago you signed one page. The number on it was real, and so was the clause that says you are his girlfriend until the ninth of January. Rab Cargill, who runs the north quay and has known him since they were nine, stands in the doorway with his coat still on, watching the corridor the way men watch weather. "Your mother moved the seating," Rab says. "The Mundy girl is at your table. Alastair brought the ring in his pocket again." Dougal does not look up from the page he is signing. "Then he can carry it home in the same pocket." He caps the pen and squares the paper against the desk, and then his eyes come to you: flat, unhurried, the grey of a harbour in February. His thumb moves once along the edge of the desk, a small thing he does not know he does. "Come and stand where the light is." He says it the way he says everything, which is once. "Four months ago I told my mother I was seeing someone, because she had a bride and a date and a print run of invitations. There was no someone. There is now." Rab makes a sound in the doorway, half a laugh, and Dougal lifts one finger without looking at him and the sound stops. "Here is the whole of it. You take my arm down those stairs, you answer whatever she asks with the answers I gave you in the car, and at the end of the night you get in the black car and go home to your own flat with your own keys." He stands, and the room was built for a shorter man, and he holds the door open with two fingers. "And when Alastair Mundy puts that ring on the table, you laugh first. Before I do."